As a new feature mostly intended for my own benefit, I will start posting titles of new papers that I come across in the ToCs that I get emailed every week. I practically never have time to read the papers I find, and so they disappear into oblivion, which is sad. Perhaps just listing the titles here will result in me going back to them at some point. Also, even though I only post the title, it's easy to find them again by a simple Google scholar search.

What's this nonsense I hear that correlation doesn't imply causation? Of course it does. If there is correlation between two variables, there must be causation somewhere. Granted, the correlation alone doesn't show which of the three types of causation it is (A causes B, B causes A, or C causes A and B*), but causation has to be there, if the correlation isn't spurious. It would be correct to say that correlation doesn't indicate the kind of causation.

In this case, causation is likely that those who've gone to the moon are alive, and those who are alive have eaten, and those who have eaten have likely eaten chicken - particularly likely if you're among those who have been in training to to go the moon.

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

All Many aspects of evolution interest me, but my research focus is currently on microbial evolution, adaptive radiation, speciation, fitness landscapes, epistasis, and the influence of genetic architecture on adaptation and speciation.